


In the Phalanx: Three Days with the Lost Platoon, by Evan Wright

by agatestones



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 09:00:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9598877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agatestones/pseuds/agatestones
Summary: Rolling StoneJune 13, 2003In the news, it was a particular kind of story, spun to gain glory and minimize shame. Our reporter was there, ostensibly to report on the "tip of the spear" of the Iraq invasion. Instead he came back from three days stranded with the Lost Platoon and some of the unsettling, hilarious, and horrifying realities of warfare in the modern -- and premodern -- age.Originally conceived as a series of articles spread over June and July, we've decided to publish it all in one go.





	1. The Killer Elite

Bravo Two was lost. Bravo Two seemed to do that a lot, in the first six days of the invasion; they'd rolled across the border from Kuwait in Humvees, full of vinegar, and within a day had hit their first dead end road. Sgt. Brad Colbert, a team leader for the platoon, rode in the lead Humvee, in the passenger seat with a Blue Force Tracker computer (his own requisition; nobody else in the platoon had one) that showed him both roads and US armed forces massed on the map; but if an order came down from on high to take the right instead of the left, he followed orders and took the right.

Not without a certain florid sense of wronged expertise. His driver and radio man, Cpl. Joshua Ray Person, traded foul-mouthed barbs with him all times of day and night, and they held forth in great detail about the poor situational awareness of some of their officers. The one who'd commanded this right was called Encino Man, for the massive brow ridge on his face and the perceived boneheadedness of his decision-making, and they bitched about him daily. They bitched, and obeyed. They were Marines, and Marines make do.

They were First Reconnaissance Marines, based out of Camp Pendleton, California. Originally intended for amphibious intelligence gathering, they could swim, dive, climb, parachute, and cross a landscape without detection by the enemy. They were also rude, paranoid, sex-obsessed, and maniacally competitive; they at times more closely resembled a seventh-grade detention hall than they did the smooth, silent, death-dealing warriors they professed to be. They jockeyed constantly for dominance. They called each other gay while admiring each other's asses. They harbored cockamamie theories about economics, racism, farts, religion, and anything else they could think of to riff about. Person explained to me the day after he met me that we were invading Iraq because of NAMBLA, and almost made it sound logical. They were ready for action, and action was, irritatingly, mostly not ready for them. 

They'd been trained up into elites, notoriously harder than the notoriously hard Marine infantry, and it was a grave offense to their dignity to find themselves driving glorified minivans into the annals of history. Platoon convoys of five, with gasoline and water and rations strapped to the back fender, they took well-paved highways north and west, on their way toward Baghdad. Four men in a Humvee, with a fifth hanging half out of it to man the top gun, a .50 caliber that shot bullets as long as your hand, or a Mark-19, loaded with grenades. It was a fast, lean, mean operation, nimble at its best, able to race inland and up-river as Maj. Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis needed to catch the enemy with their pants down.

If they could find the enemy. When they came to dead ends, the lead vehicle radioed their coltish young Lieutenant, Nathaniel Fick, in the command truck, and he relayed their predicament onward up the chain of command. Predictably, someone higher up blamed them, or their Lieutenant, for getting turned around, as if they'd been the ones making the decisions.

In an alternate universe, these hassles would be the _systems normal_ of the old Army acronym SNAFU. It was one of many irritations that Recon Marines pride themselves on overcoming, from lack of sleep to inadequate air support to the fact that an entire batallion of 374 Marines shared a single Arabic translator. "All it takes is one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything," one of the men from a different unit told me, but from where Bravo Two sat it was a lot of dumb guys in charge, congratulating and magnifying each other's dumbness into infinity. Their protective gear was issued in the wrong color (they looked like pine trees invading a beach). They had to trade and beg for gun lubricant, batteries, clear instructions. Their officers blew the rah-rah smoke Marines call "moto" up their asses so regularly that Person liked to declare when he was developing a contact high. (This was a complete lie; he was high all the time, chewing over-the-counter stimulant pills like candy.) There were six days of that universe, of sarcasm and boredom and the extremely occasional opportunity to do some actual fighting, as they'd done on Day Five while driving through Nasiriyah. On the seventh day, we hit some kind of fate-beartrap, and crossed over into this universe.

Bravo Two had started out a little after noon, commanded to seek out a grid square to the north and east of the main column around Nasiriyah, and scout out resistance there. They were the extreme right flank of that invading spear, practically rearguard for the Marine Regimental Combat Team (RCT-1) who were blasting their way up the highway toward al Kut. In the first six days of the war, Colbert's Humvee had mainly encountered enemy individuals, on foot or in pickup trucks, sniping from the side of the road or lobbing a stray mortar from behind a village, and disappearing again. All the enemy tanks they saw were destroyed ones, blown to pieces, sometimes with charred bodies still inside. PFC Harold Trombley, 19 and disturbingly childlike in the seat behind Person, had worried at first that he would not get to shoot anybody.

What this platoon could not have known was that a superior officer had given Fick the wrong grid square when passing on their orders. They set out dutifully enough, and headed 80 kilometers northeast of where they were meant to be, instead of elbow-to-elbow with their sister platoon, Bravo Three. Later on, considerable recriminations would go into how the grid coding had been garbled; but even if the command had not been recorded (and that recording later tracked down), Fick and his Gunnery Sergeant, Mike Wynn, had marked the erroneous square on their map with grease pencil, surrounded by baffled question marks and a distinct lack of well-paved roads. They'd queried it by radio twice, and twice had it confirmed.

So Bravo were lost, and Colbert's Humvee, in the lead, was the lostest. Or rather, Colbert had a good idea where they were; he just knew they weren't in the right place. Blond and lean, 80% legs, he had a deliberate, focused way about him, even in the ritual hurling of insults which is the lingua franca of Recon Marines. In the movies, he would have been a taciturn country boy, but Colbert was from southern California, son of an architect, prone to long words which his men asked him to explain. He tinkered nerdily at regular intervals with the Blue Force Tracker throughout the afternoon.

"Maybe this is where Saddam keeps his hookers," guessed Trombley. The war had been hustled into action so quickly he hadn't had time to complete even a fraction of the training a Recon Marine usually gets. He also didn't have the rapport and verbal panache of Colbert and Person, so it was a real treat for him to be able to inspire a classic front-seat riff:

"Aw, come on," Person started in, one hand on the steering wheel, "Saddam likes his hookers all plump, like grapes. You don't send grapes out into the desert unless you want raisins back. He keeps them in some fucking gaudy palace, right by the river, so they can go swimming and stay all sleek for him. I'm serious, this is just a mission to get the LT out of sight and out of mind."

The previous afternoon, a handful of enlisted men in Bravo Two had lost their cool and confronted Encino Man over his attempt to call in artillery effectively right on top of their own heads. Someone had called him a dumb motherfucker to his face. Lieutenant Fick had tried to intervene, and gotten all the way to putting his hand on Encino Man's radio before the tension had diffused. Under an uncharitable lens, it could be viewed as assault, or at least insubordination; it wasn't clear yet how Batallion was going to react. Bravo Two were still stewing in their outrage, both at Encino Man and at the idea that Fick might end up taking the punishment for a fight he hadn't started.

Fick, who looks like a walking sunburn, comes from the sedate suburban middle class via the Ivy League. He seems to have joined the Marines because it was a challenge, and a challenge he had in his chain of command. He admitted later that he hadn't pushed back on the grid square as hard as he could have, because his relationship with Encino Man was so poor already. He didn't want to be seen as a nitpicker, a naysayer, someone insufficiently aggressive and resourceful to succeed despite challenges. And he wasn't wrong: while he was missing, a Sergeant at the company level called him a coward. His men were missing with him, so could not defend him against that slander.

Colbert ignored the speculation about Fick, and said, "But we get to do actual recon. And what the hell do you know about Saddam's hookers."

"Only the finest golden retrievers for our dear leader," Person cracked. He wasn't a small man; he just looked like one next to Colbert. Dark, a little scrawny, heavily tattooed, Person was proudly from a rural poor town in Missouri, brilliantly profane, prone to off-key singing of pop songs.

"Hitman Two One to Hitman Two," Colbert said into the radio, using the code name that raised Fick, who rode in a truck three vehicles back. "I got farmland, sir. Not even enough berm to ambush us over." On either side was yellow dirt, a few weeds on the side of the road, and fallow terraced fields over the low hills, drying out now that the rainy season was ending. Back nearer the highway, at the banks of the Tigris, they'd been surrounded by lush foliage; now they were back in the landscape they'd trained for.

Whatever Fick told Colbert, it was neutral. Although the grunts exist in a state of near-constant bitching, officers hold themselves to a different standard. He was like the substitute teacher in that seventh-grade detention hall, a representative of authority, but one without very much power to fix the broken air conditioning. He was cursed to be one of the few low-level officers in the batallion with infantry experience, from a tour in Afghanistan last year. He didn't make mistakes like call artillery down in danger-close range of his own position.

"Sir, air support would be excellent about now," said Colbert, as if suggesting they take a break and hit the Dairy Queen.

I'm sure Fick would have liked it too. He didn't have it.

Air support, usually in the form of attack Cobra helicopters, was back on the highway near Nasiriyah. First Recon had outraced their supporting column for several days running, and intended to continue in that vein right up till the General said to stop. If the circumstances were right, Fick could call in a request for a bombing raid, which would or would not come screaming out of the sky some minutes or hours later and turn everything in the designated target area to smithereens. But bombers fly too fast to get a good look at ground conditions, and they aren't on the same radio frequencies as the ground forces. To get to them you have to go through desk jockeys a hundred miles away, who relay messages back. The left hand and the right hand don't either of them know what the other is doing, and usually that's a good thing. You don't want some lowly Lieutenant calling in a raid without its being approved by someone who can see the larger map.

I don't know who was looking at the larger map that afternoon. Someone called in a bombing run, and someone approved it, thinking with good reason that Bravo Two was not even in that grid, but were 80 klicks away. Bombers aren't very accurate, especially near twilight. The Army scouts that called in the coordinates had called in a tank to their north, four klicks west of the bulge in Highway 16 on its way into Amarah. That was two klicks east and about four klicks south from the position of Colbert's Humvee at the lead of the column.

So the bomb was dropped four klicks from where it was supposed to go. Tanks move around, sometimes by as much as four klicks between the call and the response. A tank by itself looks like nothing from the air, a tiny dark square on a yellow board. A convoy of truck and Humvees looked like something.

It was sunset, the air cooling, the wind still quiet but coming soon. It was boring. On the turret gun, Cpl. Walt Hasser was swiveling back and forth: an enemy at least would be something to look at. 

Sgt. Steven Lovell at the rear of the convoy called the engine noise in to Fick. They were driving roughly northeast, on a road that was actually a wagon track, in hopes of reconnecting with one of the slim lines on Fick's map that indicated actual pavement. The bomber in question was coming up from behind them. Fick was telling his team leaders that they did not share comms with this particular air support when his words were drowned out by the scream of the falling payload.

Colbert's back stiffened in front of me. Colbert was not stiff in combat; he got stiff when someone was fucking up and he was about to start yelling. "OUT OF THE VICTOR," he bellowed, and goddamn, we got out of the victor. Hasser's feet disappeared up into the gun turret and then his boots thumped off the roof. All four doors sprang open, and we tumbled into the dirt. 

When concussive blasts go off, you want to be as low to the ground as possible, in open air, behind some kind of protective barrier if possible. The last place you want to be trapped when bombs are raining down is inside a tin can that can be crushed, flipped over, or turned into shrapnel. Colbert grabbed me by the collar of my flak jacket and yanked me forward along the side of the road for about five steps before the blast knocked us both flat. 

Bombers aren't all that accurate. The bomb didn't score a direct hit on a Humvee, or on the truck Gunny Wynn was driving, which was just as well because we'd all have been killed instantly. It was close enough, though, to shake the earth into which the Marines burrowed. The leader in each vehicle had recognized that noise, though some of the less-experienced Marines had not, and all had given the order to evacuate. They lay where they fell in the dirt, breath hot, ears ringing. There was nothing else they could do.

Probably not more than a minute passed. In the recording of the bomber's radio transmissions, there is no note made of the large red flags all the Humvees had laid flat on their hoods, to signal that they were friendlies. It went into the initial after-action report as a successful raid on a column of retreating enemy. There was no way for Bravo Two to call them off, even if they could have been heard over the explosion.

Colbert was up quickly, a ridge of fresh soil perched absurdly on the brim of his helmet. It fell off as he scuttled back up onto the road, where his Humvee had been but was no longer. It had been flipped onto its side, and while Colbert was still moving it groaned and overbalanced onto its roof. Rifle ready, Colbert hunted for Person and Trombley, who'd gone out the left side of the vehicle. He took a knee next to a supine figure, thumped it on the back, and issued a low command. Although he later said that he knew immediately it had been friendly fire (in fact, Saddam had no air force), he followed the standard protocol for what happens after the enemy softens you up with a little light bombing: they might come shoot at you face-to-face next. Person sat up, tried to watch his sector, and then collapsed again in the dirt. Colbert moved on down the convoy in search of men to help him establish a perimeter.

The first three Humvees had all flipped, the ones open to the air only onto their sides (they were less top-heavy). Wynn's truck, thanks to its weight, had gone up on two wheels and crashed back down again, breaking the front axle. Lovell's vehicle, in the rear, was upside-down with a wheel still spinning.

Dazed and bloody, Marines began to emerge from the dirt or from their overturned vehicles. The able-bodied of Bravo Two pointed their rifles in every direction, but no target came at them. They were too well-trained to fire at nothing. Fick staggered away from the truck and forward along the column, calling into his radio for his company commander, his batallion commander, any friendlies in radio range. He touched the transmission button on his radio with his right hand, across his body, because his left hand had a five-inch iron strut through it. He dripped blood down the leg of his uniform, which he did not seem to notice at first. Cpl. Teren Holsey from Lovell's Humvee paced behind him, eyes wide and mouth shut, covering the horizon with his rifle high.

There were too few people on the left side of the column: if they'd all evacuated their vehicles evenly, there should have been as many men on the left as the right. But Sgt. Rudy Reyes, who had been the driver of the third Humvee, got up from a sprawl on the passenger side instead. At once he lifted his rifle and scanned the horizon, though he tapped the side of his helmet when Sgt. Tony Espera approached him. The concussive force of the bombs had blown him a good ten feet to the right, and blown out his eardrums. 

Fick's radio gave him back nothing but dead air, no matter what jargon he shouted into it. They'd had trouble with the radio before, just dead spots or glitches now and then, but nothing like this. The fact that the Humvees were all ass-over-teakettle, their whip antennas pointing towards the ground, their sister platoon 70 klicks away, probably didn't help.

Iraqi soldiers and irregulars failed to attack the perimeter. Nobody came at all: the fields were fallow, and probably any local residents had fled from exactly this kind of inaccurate bombing days before. Fick counted the number of his men on watch, grabbed three of them off the line, and sent them to move the wounded. The medic, a Navy Corpsman named Robert Timothy Bryan, hunted through the disarray of his vehicle's cargo for his supplies, and invited the Marines in four-letter words to help him establish a makeshift hospital.

Marines wear body armor and helmets, which on that day saved their lives. Sgt. Larry Shawn "Pappy" Patrick later described the sensation of a large object -- he thought it was the brake pedal from his vehicle -- bouncing off his back. He insisted on crawling by himself toward Bryan's care, despite five or six bits of Humvee embedded in his leg. That was where most of the bleeding injuries occurred, legs and asses and a few arms, as shrapnel sprayed the fleeing backs of the men originally on the passenger side of the column. Worse off were the driver's side Marines, who'd been thrown around like rag dolls. Trombley had to lie flat, unable to bend at the waist: probably a fractured pelvis. Corporals Evan Stafford and John Christeson, from the back of Fick's truck, had gotten tangled up in each other and now had three broken legs between them. Everyone had dirt up their noses, ground into their teeth, tiny pebbles embedded in their chins and cheekbones.

Beside and half-under the truck, Bryan crawled over bodies and did what he could. Hasser, whose swift exit from the gun turret had left him unharmed, dragged his patients to him one by one. It was about this time that Wynn took Lieutenant Fick by the elbow and insisted he have his wound looked at, a suggestion Fick took in with incredulity. "Right, yes, of course," he said, staring dumbfounded at his ruined hand. The iron strut was still through it, brushing against the leg of his uniform every now and then. He didn't mention any pain.

(Back on the highway to al Kut, the grunts of First Recon had begun to recognize that Bravo Two was missing. At sunset, they were told they'd get rest, and a few men from other platoons went to chat up their friends, and couldn't track them down. What was annoying at 19:00 turned into real concern by 21:00, when General Mattis ordered the whole batallion to drive northwest three hours at breakneck speed and prepare to assault an airfield. The turning point was one of those rare moments when the weaknesses of the officer corps turned up daisies: an officer derisively nicknamed Captain America overheard his men's worried speculation, got it into his head that Bravo Two must have been massacred to the last man, and jumped several levels in the chain of command to report this notion with breathless melodrama to the batallion commander, Lt. Col. Stephen Ferrando.

(To his credit, Ferrando reported to the General that he was still assembling his men, and would prefer to delay an hour or two as the strays sorted themselves out. The General was not pleased by this, and commanded First Recon to depart immediately. Ferrando did what Marines do: he bitched and obeyed. But this is also what Marines do: because the General hadn't told him not to, Ferrando detached one of his staff Majors and a Humvee of volunteers to go search for Bravo Two. They went, of course, and searched the grid square nearby, not the one 80 kilometers away. They hunted all night and found nothing.)

Sunset, day seven in this universe, or Day One of the Lost Platoon: no functioning vehicles; food and water sufficient for the short term; arms and ammo ditto. There were 24 souls, about half of them able-bodied (depending on how you define that term), under the command of a 25-year-old Lieutenant with only one functional hand. They were miles out of position, unable to communicate, and nobody knew they were there.


	2. Missions

Combat medics don't have time for bullshit. Their course of training is focused on the short-term, by design: stabilize the patient, send him off to someplace that can fix what's wrong with him, move on to the next patient. Doc Bryan worked into the night on the wounded in open air, and then huddled under a blanket with a flashlight in his teeth to sew up lacerations without giving away their position to any potential stray enemies. He could provide no help to those deafened by the blast (four people) and only advice to lie the fuck down, on their sides in case they puked, to those with concussions. Ray Person was one of these, stunned into silence for once. His wasn't the worst; Bryan suspected that Sgt. Leandro Baptista had a fractured skull, but there was nothing to be done about it with a medic's tools. Bryan could pack shrapnel wounds, give small doses of morphine, stabilize a broken bone, but some time late in the night he touched the tourniquet all Marines wear like necklaces still at his throat: he hadn't needed it. And thank all the fucks, he said dully: an arterial bleed, even treated with a tourniquet, is either evacuated within the hour to better help, or dead.

There was no evacuation within the hour to be had, and he seemed to be the first to recognize what that meant. He didn't explain it to Lieutenant Fick in his initial summary of the injured; Fick had other things to consider, like their tactical position and broken vehicles. Bryan also decided, at a late hour somewhere between Day One and Day Two, to remove the iron strut that had gone through Fick's hand rather than leave it in place for surgeons to remove with care later on. Fick was in charge, and still had to function; and anyway, the strut was sharp at both ends. He was in danger of injuring himself further.

A trio of Corporals had managed to right the second overturned Humvee in the convoy, only to watch all its engine fluids drain out of holes in its undercarriage and onto the road. Two of them lay under it anyway, and cursed quietly as they worked. The third was explaining to Fick the kind of heavy equipment they would need, and didn't have, to transplant the working truck engine into a Humvee when Bryan walked up. 

"Okay, well, keep at it for now," Fick said, and followed his medic back to the hospital.

Bryan unclipped Fick's rifle from the strap that held it around his chest, a powerfully symbolic gesture among Marines, who recite odes to their rifles in basic training. Bryan put it down beside Fick's knee, but he wasn't going to be able to use it soon: it's almost impossible to fire it accurately with only one working hand. Fick would have to defend himself with the sidearm on his right hip. He sat down in the dirt in full view of the wounded, and asked Gunny Wynn to hold his arm still for examination. Colbert, who had just come off his watch shift, stood at a wary distance, his rifle still at the ready though there was nothing he could do to help. Fick rested his chin on the meat of Wynn's shoulder and gave a tight little smile. "It's all right," he said, and then Bryan yanked out the iron strut.

That was not all right. Fick bit his Gunny hard enough to draw blood, and managed not to cry out. (The Gunny might have made that noise instead, what with the surprise of being bitten by his superior officer.) Bryan had to pick out several loose pieces of bone from the the edges of the hole in Fick's palm, just below the ring finger: hard little white chips like bits of shell in a plate of scrambled eggs. He gave Fick a shot of antibiotics, and told him to come back for another in the morning. The wound packed and wrapped, the hand cradled to the front of his body armor, the whole left arm tied so it couldn't move, Fick stood up, swayed once, and got on with things. He had a rescue to plan.

He didn't ask for volunteers. He called two of his three team leaders, Colbert and Lovell, to his side, and spread out his map on the hood of the broke-down truck. He gave them their mission without fanfare. Lovell, beefy and with a face like a brick, was Marathon One, to head westerly to try and find the rest of the batallion. Colbert was Marathon Two: his mission was south, to find any friendly at all, and send them back with help. 

"You're going alone. I can't spare the men to send you in pairs," Fick told them. "Lovell, you've got the command radio, in case you're able to raise batallion before you see them. Make yourselves copies of the map, pack up only what you need, and be ready in fifteen."

Fick was not asking his men to run a marathon, because a marathon is 26.2 miles. He was asking them to run twice that, through hostile territory, in the dark, alone. On the other hand, they were Recon Marines. If anybody could do it, they could. Colbert's job in particular would be difficult: he was trying to hook up with the Army, whose radio codes and pass phrases they didn't know. He would have to find a way not to get hit by friendly fire a second time.

While they assembled their gear, I asked Fick, hadn't the first marathon runner, in Ancient Greece, dropped dead at the end of it?

"No, that's Plutarch's fault." Fick had been a classics major at Dartmouth, only three years before. He grinned wearily. "Dialing up the drama quotient. In sources closer to the period, it's clear that the whole army marched from Marathon to Athens, in heavy armor and their battle wounds, to defend the city from further attack by sea."

Next to his overturned Humvee, Colbert was discarding items that he wouldn't need on his night run. He'd already diagnosed his beloved Blue Force Tracker as irreparably fucked (anyway, it wasn't portable); the face of his watch was cracked too, but it still ran. Some things in his pack, it was clear, had been meant as surprises for later on in the invasion: cans of Chef Boyardee, to celebrate with. He gave Walt Hasser a precious fresh copy of Hustler magazine, a prize among bored and lonely Marines. Ray Person, still addled, cajoled one of the men into helping him stagger over to watch the preparations. Colbert gave him a bag of Skittles.

"Your raggedy ass would never keep up," he said.

Person's voice was thin and faint, but even concussed he could summon sarcasm. "When you get lost, you'll miss my raggedy ass." He poured out the Skittles into his palm to share, and Colbert, as usual, picked out the purple ones.

On slips of paper Fick described their situation in a few terse sentences and signed his name at the bottom, to save time when they found friendly lines. Fick's handwriting was bad, side effect of not being able to hold down the paper while he wrote. The lines traveled upwards unevenly across the page. "We'll stick around here for the night to try and fix the victors," he told them, "and after that we head due south, at a walk. If you aren't back in three days we'll have rescued our own damn selves."

They nodded smartly and strapped on their night vision goggles. Wynn had gone around collecting batteries from everyone else's sets, so the two marathoners would have spares. They didn't say goodbye. They set out at 04:45 on Day Two, Lovell west and Colbert south, in the loping, confident strides of long-distance travelers. They promised to walk until dawn, careful on the uneven ground, but it's doubtful they kept that promise.

Stage-whispers of "Fuck yeah!" and "Get some!" echoed behind them as they went.

A whole essay could -- should -- be written about Lovell's and Colbert's journeys across the landscape in their different directions. They both wrote after-action reports in brisk military-ese, which is how I know that Colbert avoided enemy contact entirely (although he bartered his wristwatch for guidance as he neared American lines) and Lovell killed two men hauling an RPG tube through a field before he could complete his mission. But both declined to provide any additional detail for the general public. Lovell never saw his Lieutenant again in Iraq, but Colbert did, forced to wait on the tarmac for the rescue helicopters to return.

Afterward, from his hospital bed, Fick wrote them both up for medals.

Person lay back down gingerly next to the Humvee he could no longer call his. His sleeping bag, at least, was undamaged. "It's so fucking quiet I can hear my ears ringing," he said, and closed his eyes. The Doc had instructed me to wake him every hour and assess his pupils, and then paused and shook his head. 

"What the fuck am I saying. If he's got a hemorrhage I'm not gonna do fucking brain surgery. Let him sleep." I let him sleep.

Marines came off watch, woke their replacements, and lay down to sleep or visited their friends in Doc's little hospital. Cpl. James Chaffin lay, like most of the men with leg injuries, on his belly, bored and angry at being unable to do his duty. His best friend in the platoon, Cpl. Gabriel Garza (both wrists sprained), came to offer him water near dawn.

"Are we really leaving the victors in the morning?" he asked, more as a complaint than a question. Garza shrugged, though the drying smears of oil on his forehead should have been a clue.

Pappy Patrick rolled, looking for a comfortable position for the shrapnel in his leg. "The LT knows what he's doing, Chaffin."

"This is fucking ridiculous." Some Recon Marines wear a single knee pad, so that they can kneel and fire their rifles efficiently. If Chaffin had been wearing one, he probably wouldn't have seen the tendons behind his knee clipped by a bit of shrapnel. Its straps would have protected him, in part or in full. Except for that one injury, which turned his lower leg into a noodle, he was fine.

"We'd have to leave them eventually, right?" I asked. "Won't we run out of water?"

Chaffin turned on me like I'd sprung a trap. "You know how much water weighs? We're gonna be fucking carrying your share too, _reporter_."

"Aw, come on," Garza said, hands up.

"Fucking _cilivians_." Contempt screwed up his features. I knew it wasn't really me he was mad at, and in his state I could outrun him. Still, it's a little scary, when a Marine less than ten feet away from you starts thinking you might be a soft target.

Either Fick's hearing is absolutely fantastic, or he was standing somewhere out of sight and heard the whole exchange. He strode among us, ghostly in the dimness. "Stow that shit, Corporal. This _civilian_ is going to be pulling donkey duty in the morning, hauling your fat ass 20 miles. So lay off him."

I'm a big guy, over six foot and 200 lbs., but not Marine fit by any means. This was the first I was hearing that I would be performing manual labor. 

"Listen." Fick crouched down, surrounded by the wounded. A surprising number were awake, too wired or hurting too bad despite the morphine to take advantage of the break. "Listen. We're in the shit right now, and that sucks. But we'll deal. We've got a perimeter, we've got our weapons, we are not gonna die here. If our marathoners get through, that's great, we're golden. We're also prepared for the eventuality that they don't. We're Marines. We can handle this."

I don't know what kind of speech I was expecting. Moto, I guess. Moto does not acknowledge out loud that two of the strongest Marines in the unit have been sent off to do something they might not survive. I'm not entirely sure Fick was expecting to give a speech at all, so.

But after that, everyone shut up and settled down again to get in one more hour of rest. Except Chaffin himself, who dragged a pair of boltcutters over to one of the Humvees, and spent the rest of the night turning the useless whip antenna into a quasi-flexible knee brace using torn-up strips of clothing. He'd sworn he could walk, and goddamn, he got up that morning and walked. Miserable, sore, his leg swelling till it took on the shape of the brace and then some, he walked. With a pack on his back, too.

Armchair warriors and future training classrooms may debate Fick's decision-making. He abandoned the wrecked Humvees rather than continue to try to fix them. He left a relatively secure location -- if nothing else, the Humvees were cover -- to cross an unfamiliar landscape. Except for his marathon messengers, he kept the group together, despite half of them being too weak for combat. He headed south instead of east; the town of Amarah was a much closer target, reachable within a day if they humped it and left the wounded behind. They could have found a doctor and transport there. They would have found Army units moving into the area from the south the following morning. They might have been fine. Or they might have walked right into Fedayeen capture, been paraded as hostages, been executed on the spot, been bombed by friendly fire a second time as the Army took the city. Anyway, he made decisions. He was in command.

Fick decided to walk, decided not to try walking at night, and decided to go south instead of east. That put Bravo Two still in the yellow fields at the end of Day Two, still in the yellow fields on the morning of Day Three. Without wheels, without radio, without the Blue Force Tracker, Bravo Two was effectively reduced to conditions not too dissimilar from the army after the Battle of Marathon, in 490 BC, marching back toward Athens with everything they needed on their backs. 

They wore pants. Their food wouldn't go bad. Bullets were a lot more effective than spears, if they did have to defend themselves. But they were back to foot-power and manual labor, and they made do.

(On the outskirts of the airfield First Recon intended to attack that morning, Marines in other companies and platoons realized that Bravo Two was really, truly missing, and the bitching got loud. Oh, they obeyed, and prepared for their morning assault, but they bitched strategically to RCT-1, and to their supply column, and to their air support, about the whole platoon that some genius had misplaced. RCT-1 shared comms with a unit that had an ABC News crew embedded in it. It's doubtful the grunts knew in advance it would get onto the evening news, but my sources indicate they didn't cry too hard about it when it happened.)

(This is also something Marines do: they are past masters of using emotional blackmail on their superior officers.)

Four men definitely could not walk: Trombley (broken pelvis), Christeson (broken leg), Stafford (two broken legs), and Baptista, who was awake, but couldn't yet be coaxed to speak in English (he was Brazilian by birth). Everyone else was going to be humping it, even Patrick, the only one of Fick's original team leaders still present, who had six shards of iron embedded in his thigh. ("Well I guess I won't get anemia," he joked.) Gunny Wynn put men to work as the sun rose, disassembling the vertical ribs of their ruined truck and lashing them together to make Indian-style travoises. Holsey, one of the tinkering Corporals from the previous night, even tried to lash the foot of a travois to a spare tire to make a rough wheelbarrow, but it was unsteady, and the worst thing you could do to a wounded man was drop him.

So travoises it was, basically elongated stretchers with one end intended to drag in the dirt. The other end bore rope loops for a man to shoulder like a backpack, and that was how the worst of the wounded would be dragged. Rudy Reyes took up the loops to drag Baptista. Patrick joked at him, and Reyes laughed back despite being unable to hear a word. A pale, bovine Corporal named Jason Lilley (a ragged, wheel-well-shaped laceration on his hip and a knee the size of a basketball) shouldered Trombley's litter. I got Christeson, and Sgt. Anthony Jacks, Manimal to his friends, took Stafford. (Jacks had a broken nose and a fat lip. Somehow all of the turret gunners, of which he was one, had escaped the bomb relatively clean.) The daylight was painful for the men with concussions; straggling behind the rhythmic sway of Lilley's stride came Person, suffering with outrageous Elvis-style sunglasses on under his helmet.

The Marines who were not doing donkey's work kept their rifles ready and their eyes on the horizon. They limped and leaned on their friends; three would become dizzy under the bright sun and need frequent breaks; several more were hard of hearing; but they watched their sectors. They couldn't have taken a tank, but it would have been a fair fight against the ones and twos who'd sniped at them on the highway on their way to Nasiriyah only a few days before.

I stumbled on in the middle of it, dragging Christeson, and was grateful to be spelled before noon. In lieu of a 180-lb. Marine, though, I was asked to shoulder a 50-pound pack: mostly water, but also food and ammo. Even Fick wore one, clipped high on his chest so it wouldn't be near his hand. His sidearm in his good hand, his rifle on Gunny Wynn's back, he conferred regularly with Espera, who in the absence of serious injury and of Colbert was acting as a team leader.

("Fucking white man," Espera confided that afternoon. He'd come from a broken home in Los Angeles, and had some strong opinions about western imperialism. "Train us all the fuck up, best of the best, and then blow us up on _accident_? Man, at least do it with a purpose. A Marine gotta die for manifest destiny, it should be intentional.")

Bryan insisted that Fick's hand get a check and a cleaning at the lunch break. Medics have pretty good poker faces on the whole, but Fick wasn't fooled. "Bad?" he asked, as Bryan tried to look at the hand from all angles without jostling it. It was red and puffy, the edges of the hole the strut had left angry and tight, the last two fingers limp. The tip of the ring finger was purple.

"Yeah, pretty bad," Bryan told him, and gave him another shot of antibiotics. He washed the wound meticulously with drinking water (they were out of saline by then), palpating as gently as he could around the musculature of the hand. Yellowish pus oozed out of the wound, and Bryan wiped it away without a word. He bound up Fick's hand as before, and told him not to jostle it.

We resumed our journey. Fick and Wynn walked together, talking in low voices so they wouldn't be overheard. Occasionally, Wynn would spin and walk backwards for a few paces: counting his flock of Marines in case any strayed.


	3. The Time

An hour before sunset on Day Two of the Lost Platoon, Tony Espera, on point, found a single set of tank tread marks in the dirt. He judged them not fresh, as they'd been made in mud and the mud had then dried: it had last rained three days ago.

Still, he jogged back to the group of 21 souls plodding due south through fallow fields to report his findings to Fick, who promptly told the men to stop singing. They weren't too loud -- they saved their breath -- but they'd independently discovered the reason marching songs exist, and also discovered that almost anything sung emphatically enough can be turned into a marching song. At the moment Espera interrupted them, they were working their way through "Rubber Ducky," because the rap contingent and the country music contingent had been at each other's throats for the past hour, and Espera and Wynn had kids the right age for it. The unfortunate side-effect of watching a bunch of twenty-year-olds stomp doggedly across the landscape grunting _Rubber Ducky, I'm awfully fond of you_ was the reminder how young most of them were.

A trio of able-bodied Marines escorted their commander to inspect the tracks. Fick said, "Well, I guess we know they didn't just bomb us out of spite," and that was all. They kept on walking.

(The Army had bombed the Humvee convoy of Bravo Two a little under 24 hours ago. They should have gone out and verified that their air support really had bombed what they thought they'd bombed, in which case they should have found the Marine platoon and rescued its wounded. Why didn't the Army do their job? They did. They verified a column of three tanks, 16 kilometers to the south and west of Bravo Two's present position, which had been bombed and destroyed recently. In this case, "recently" meant by Marine air support, two days prior, but a bombed-out tank looks like a bombed-out tank. They found what they were looking for, and didn't worry too hard that they found it not where they were looking for it. They didn't find Bravo Two, because they didn't know to look for them.

(Why didn't the Army know that a Marine platoon was missing in their vicinity? Lt. Col. Ferrando had spent the morning storming the airfield (an airfield that was, it turned out, defended solely by camels), and then, once victory was achieved, informed his General that he had misplaced 23 of his men and one embedded reporter. The General was not pleased. But in a war fought in front of TV cameras, the General was also canny about bad publicity: he gave First Recon 48 hours of rest time, and told them they'd better damn well be at full strength on its completion. If not for the grunts' bitching, it's possible the Lost Platoon could have been found without any embarrassing news stories at all. Well, except mine, I guess.

(Why were we lost? Because people got lost in Iraq all the time, and sometimes got captured by the retreating Iraqi army, but sometimes just got lost. Because the CIA was sticking its nose in all over the area of operations, pulling away a platoon here, a company there, for missions they didn't communicate clearly to anyone. Equipment lay abandoned in ditches and by bridges, and sometimes small units stopped to graze on the bounty. Traffic jams, mixed-up reporting structures, inter-departmental resentment, crappy radio. This isn't a war like World War II, where every move was deliberated and annotated in advance, in triplicate. This is a nimble kind of warfare, warfare without a net. Nobody seemed to have realized yet that when the tightrope snaps, there's nothing there to catch you.)

Bravo Two walked on for another couple of hours, and had to quit at sunset. There weren't enough night vision goggles -- or rather, not enough batteries to power them -- to go around. They'd given most of the batteries to Marathons One and Two.

The night was moonless, so the NVGs would work poorly anyway. Five men took up watch in various directions, and the rest settled in for the startling cold of the desert at night. Person lay down next to Trombley, and fed him bites of MRE meatloaf.

"I'm gonna puke," said Trombley, still lashed into the travois that had got him this far. Person was the one who'd puked the previous night, his concussion still fresh, but he cackled.

"I could be feeding you spaghetti. Now _that_ would be gay."

Trombley was doped up on morphine, but Trombley was firm: "Fuck you, I like spaghetti."

Doc Bryan assessed each of the wounded with sure hands. "Oh sure," he told Person. "Colbert leaves you, and you hook up with the next asshole that'll laugh at your jokes."

"You know why the LT sent him south, right? Stead of west?" he grumbled. "Fucking, the righteousness of Brad once roused is impossible to appease. He'd find First Recon and get himself fucking arrested before he could even tell anyone where we are. The LT's not stupid. You can't kill the whole Army."

"Well, good goddamn," Patrick observed. He and Espera were the two team leaders, and had to frown on that kind of talk. Or mock it. " _The righteousness of Brad._ He's gonna piss himself laughing he hears that one."

"Seriously, though! You know he'll snap someday, which is why I make sure he loves me best." 

"Excuse me," piped up Hasser. "He's always telling you to shut up. I am the one he loves best." Mutinous topic avoided: mission success. For the record, Person swears today that Colbert will never actually snap, because that would be messy. Colbert is too fussy about rules to even fantasize about murdering his incompetent superiors. _What the fuck kind of brain damage did you have?_ was Colbert's reaction to report of this conversation.

Doc Bryan got Baptista to drink some water, frowned over Chaffin's swollen leg, and then turned to the Lieutenant. He unwrapped the wound on his left hand slowly, like a Christmas present you don't want.

It had been bad in the early afternoon, and was worse now. The ring fingertip was no longer purple but black. The rest of his hand was a furious red, swollen and strange. Pus flowed freely into the hole in the middle of his palm. 

"Sir," said Bryan, and then didn't continue. Gunny Wynn, never out of arm's reach of his Lieutenant, craned his bull neck to see for himself under the flashlight.

"Okay," said Wynn. "How does this affect our timeline?"

It was at least partly unintentional that Fick had kept his Marines in the dark. Officers hate to appear weak in front of their men. He later told me that he didn't take the situation as seriously as he should have, for the simple reason that his fingers were numb. They didn't hurt, so it couldn't be that bad, right? The little camp grew still. Bryan cleared his throat.

"I'll do it at dawn. Daylight's better than working with a fucking flashlight."

"Oh," said Fick carefully. "You mean now."

Even Reyes, who couldn't hear a thing, figured out the gist from body language alone. Around the circle of Marines, wide eyes, careful blank expressions, like children watching their parents fight. Bryan held onto Fick's wrist, and plowed through his blunt assessment.

"I mean if I did it right fucking now, I might miss some necrosis under this shitty light and have to do it again in the morning anyway." He could use eye contact to devastating effect. He never looked away from Fick as he laid out the dire future: "But yeah, I mean now, if you want to save the thumb."

The timeline. Rescue might come in the night, and nothing would have to happen at dawn. Rescue might never come. It was clear Bryan had been hoping to avoid this situation, while Fick had been working through what would need to occur if it did.

Cpl. Michael Stinetorf spoke the dismay of his fellow grunts. "You're gonna cut off his fingers?"

"You ever done this shit before?" asked Patrick.

Bryan had not done this shit before, and they all knew it. Fick looked around the circle, and then brought his attention back to Bryan. "Ah, not that I'm looking forward to it, but if you took it off at the wrist now, would that be safer?"

"I'm not cutting off your hand, sir."

Fick gave him the same tight smile he'd given right before Bryan yanked out the iron strut. "Not even if I order you to do it?"

Bryan lowered his head. "Carpals are complicated. Metacarpals are simple. Trust me, you don't want that."

Amputation of an entire hand is a disabling event. Prostheses just aren't that good yet. The more of the hand that Bryan could save, the more he was saving Fick's career as a Marine. Also, Bryan pointed out afterward, what he said is literally true. Wrist bones are smaller and their layout in a tangle of tendons is more complex than the finger bones in the meat of your palm, which lie in straight rows. The simpler and faster he could cut, the sooner it would be over.

Fick finally gave a nod. "Okay, do what you have to."

"Fuck," said Bryan, and the circle of Marines breathed out as one. "I'll prep for daylight surgery."

When the watch shift changed, a couple of hours later, Espera came and squatted in front of Patrick for a sitrep, and after a moment there came a strangled _WHAT?!_ from their huddle. The men discussed it in twos and threes, furtive but not very subtle. Did you see it? No, man, I was at a bad angle. I guess it was gnarly, though. Are they really gonna? How can it be that bad? What if they just --

Fick stood apart to talk with Gunny Wynn, ate something, and finally at Bryan's insistence he laid himself down to try to rest. His Marines speculated in furious whisper for a little while -- Trombley asserted wildly that one of the donkeys should just pick up the LT in a fireman's carry and hump him to Amarah in the darkness, alone -- but after Fick went down they subsided into quiet. Chaffin, who'd been pugnacious the night before, crawled to his pack and retrieved his half-used bottle of mouthwash.

"Here," he told Doc Bryan. "It's like antiseptic and shit, right?"

Bryan nodded, and the deluge began: that one clean t-shirt someone had been saving, in case they ever got to shower again in their lives. Slivers of soap. A whetstone for the knife. (The knife would be a scalpel, and in no need of sharpening.) Person offered his precious health-store uppers.

"Enough of these, I'm in no pain," he said. 

"Yeah, and your heart's going double-time. I'm not gonna make him bleed out on the table," Bryan told him. There wasn't actually a table to work on. Stinetorf began to lay out their paltry tools in the dirt right next to Stafford, but Bryan told him to move further away. "No, he'll be fighting it. Give him some space."

He got some sleep too, just about two hours. We all slept, except for the watch. The sky was graying to the east when Bryan woke four people: Manimal, Reyes, Lilley, and me. We were part of the donkey crew, and the biggest men available. It was going to be our job to hold him down. We weren't given the opportunity to volunteer.

Fick came over, wide awake, to interrupt a quiet logistical discussion (we were drawing pictures in the dirt for Rudy's comprehension). He crouched at the edge of our circle. "So this is not how I pictured things going," he told us. "I wanted to say --"

He paused and on a quick look it became clear the entire camp was awake and watching him. Even Baptista, eyes slitted in his travois. Hasser raised up on one elbow and prompted him. "Sir?"

"Ah, just that while I'm out, Gunny's in charge, and I know he'll do right by us all. We're not more than another day from people. And -- I'm sorry. About this whole situation. You've all handled yourselves amazingly under very difficult circumstances. And don't," this was to the four big men in front of him, "don't be nice to me. I bit Gunny last time, if you'll recall."

"Goddamn rabies," said Bryan from behind him, and it was time.

We four and Bryan scrubbed our hands with the mismatched bits of soap. Fick took off his helmet and body armor, handed them to Espera, and lay down on the sleeping bag that had been prepared for him (Bryan's own). Bryan snapped on medical gloves, took up the ruined hand, and washed it thoroughly while we arranged ourselves. Manimal sat on his legs, and Lilley laid his torso down on the Lieutenant's outstretched arm. It was my job to hold his head, which was in my lap. I put up a hand against his left cheek so he wouldn't be able to see. With smooth care, Reyes folded Fick's right arm against his body, and then rolled his own body over Fick's in a variation of the sniper's spotter bear-hug: ribs on ribs, his thigh clamping down over Fick's hips. Stinetorf crouched over us, flashlight glowing as they waited for dawn.

"Don't let me go," said Fick. 

"Breathe with me, sir," Reyes said, his face in Fick's collarbone. He could feel the vibration of Fick's speaking, even if he couldn't discern words.

The hand to be operated on rested on the side of an empty ammo box, covered with Reyes's checkered neckcloth. Bryan chivvied it a bit, to make sure it was stable and flat, and then put on the tourniquet and administered the morphine. His kit didn't have the kind of drugs that the operation needed: a nerve block, a paralytic agent. His job was to stabilize and transport, and he was working way beyond his job. He fitted a leather belt between Fick's teeth, and tied a rag as a surgical mask over his mouth and nose. When dawn broke over his right shoulder, Bryan took a deep breath, said a muffled, "Fuck this," and uncapped his scalpel.

The knife flashed silver in the dawn light against the base of Fick's palm, below the wound. Bryan let it sink into clean, healthy flesh and blood welled up on either side of it, bright, viscous.

Fick grunted. Bryan sank the knife in a full inch, and it turned into a groan. Reyes, atop Fick's torso, moved a little as tension thrummed through the patient. The screaming didn't start till Bryan's scalpel reached the bone.

Manimal bore down on his ankles as he thrashed. I had the misfortune of holding his head, which meant I got to watch him beg me with his eyes. Fick screamed three times before he couldn't draw enough air for it, and then he panted, shallow, vocal on the indrawn breath. Reyes's shoulders rose and fell as he breathed deeply, the sniper way, but Fick could not stay in sync with him.

"You're doing good, sir," Espera said suddenly, in my ear. I hadn't heard him come close. He reached around me and helped hold Fick's arm above Lilley's body. "Doing good." Another pair of hands came down on the toes of Fick's boots, and held them still: Garza. Espera kept on: "That's right, sir. Not much longer now."

The procedure Bryan performed was crude, because it was quick. He cut open the hand between the middle and ring fingers, splitting the flesh all the way up, and then cut sideways past the bases of the last two metacarpals, sawing a little on the tendons that held them in place, till the ring and pinky fingers fell away. He pushed them aside, spidery and creepy in the orange light. They still had fingernails, which were dirty. Bryan spared no thought for them, and returned his attention to the remaining parts of the hand.

A tattooed forearm came down past mine, and helped hold Fick's head as he panted and shook. Ray Person. Hasser crouched at my other side and rested his fingertips on Fick's cheek. Chaffin crawled over and leaned into Reyes's back, the two of them breathing together. "That's right, sir," said Stafford, from where the travoises lay, and Christeson echoed him, "All right, sir." "Doing good, sir." Baptista, faintly: "Bom, sir. Bom." Their voices all mixed together in a low murmur of encouragement.

Bryan poked around with the scalpel, drawing blood seemingly at random, till he touched the fleshy heel of the palm and the blood welled up sluggish and purple. He sliced off that flesh, tried again, and it bled properly. He put down the scalpel after that.

Never let anyone tell you the human body is merciful. Despite intense hyperventilation, Nate Fick never passed out. Moisture fell from his eyes and darkened the hair at his temples; his knees bounced from the adrenaline rocketing through his system. Bryan used the last of the gauze, fresh from its sterile packaging, to stanch the bleeding he'd made. He was done long before Fick's body unclenched, long before it was safe for his men to let him go. The sun rose and turned yellow and still we held him down, and he never passed out. 

"It's all right, sir, it's over," said Bryan, removing his makeshift surgical mask, and tied off the wrapping over Fick's hand. Then, efficient as always, he turned to deal with the dead flesh that lay dusky and useless on his operating table.


	4. The Finish Line

At the next shift change, Gunny Wynn came back and crouched in front of the scrum, but he didn't ask any questions about how it had gone. He seemed content just to be there, in case he was needed. Also, he had to shoo Espera, Hasser, and Garza off to stand their watch.

When Fick seemed to have fallen into a fitful, twitching sleep, we let him go. One by one we got up, shook out our stiffness, and stepped back. Reyes was last, and rolled back off Fick's body with gentle care. "Keep breathing, brother," he said, and as he sat up he pulled his sleeve free of Fick's right hand, which clutched it in a deathgrip so tight those fingers looked dead too at first.

The owner of the belt got it back, with a perfect moon of teeth impressions in the middle of it. 

Bryan laid down that fresh clean t-shirt on Fick's chest, and then lifted the foreshortened hand onto it. "I'll tie it up in a while," Bryan told them all. "You just keep him still and let him rest."

"He might need some water," Trombley suggested, unable to bring it himself. 

"Yeah, and a blanket," added Stafford.

These were fetched. Fick startled at the sensation of water against his lip, and woke up fighting. He tried to lift his wounded hand and Wynn held it down carefully, hushing him like a child. Fick groaned again, and settled. The Gunny sang him "All My Exes Live in Texas" (making up quite a few extra verses, since he's from Texas and knows the town names) till we were sure he was asleep. We let him rest till almost eight in the morning.

The men who'd been on watch during the operation were silent and expectant, eating their breakfasts in a crouch as if fighting were about to break out. The rest of us were silent and just fucking tired. Wynn approached Christeson and talked to him quietly; the Corporal went a little pale, but nodded.

At 08:00, it was time to go. Bryan woke Fick with water again, and this time he didn't fight. They let him sit up to drink it, but that was a mistake, and he didn't argue when Wynn pushed him down again, a hand behind his head, and brought the cup to his mouth. Bryan bound his arm securely. Lilley and Manimal, both still on donkey duty, lifted him by shoulders and feet onto one of the four travoises -- Christeson's. With only one broken leg, he was the least-disabled of the four disabled Marines. Baptista sat up to argue otherwise, put his hand to his head, and lay down again.

Garza supported Christeson's awkward hopping gait when we got started; probably in the afternoon he would have carried him on his shoulders. Reyes knelt in front of Fick's litter, tucked in the blanket around him, and pushed his helmet back to touch foreheads with him. "Keep breathing, brother," he said again, and got up to shoulder that load. Unlike most people temporarily struck deaf, Reyes didn't shout but whispered everything he said, and he whispered that too. 

And so we walked. Due south, as fast as we could manage, Wynn in charge and Patrick his second in command. Espera took point again, scowling at the horizon. Day Three.

It was 09:17, according to the Army, when Brad Colbert flagged down the lead Humvee in a convoy of supply trucks headed west toward Nasiriyah. He stepped out into the middle lane of the highway holding his rifle above his head, "like a fucking ghost out of wars past," one Lance Corporal remarked later. When the Army Lieutenant in charge of the convoy, Dana Massimo, approached him on foot, Colbert was not able to speak, so the note Fick had written 28 hours prior turned out to be useful after all.

The convoy turned around, though they were expected in Nasiriyah by 09:30. They hauled ass back to the nearest command, and passed Colbert and the note back, and then set forth again. Colbert never caught their names; in his after-action report they are described as "Army men," as if they were toys. Dana Massimo is also a woman.

At 09:54, the rescue was underway, only three hours too late for Fick's hand. Lovell had a shorter distance to travel, but more enemy to avoid. He was able to get radio contact at 10:02, in the suburbs of Ar Rifa, still five klicks out from physical contact with any Marines, who knew exactly who he was when his voice rang out in their ears. In the recording of his distress call, he is so breathless he is difficult to understand. He pauses halfway through reciting his platoon's last known location to puke noisily.

We walked south, and then we stopped so that Doc Bryan could check on Fick. He was quiet, wrung out or humiliated or maybe that was the morphine. Fick kept his eyes closed, the brim of his helmet too high to protect him from the sun. Bryan looked up, snapped his fingers at Person, and said, "Get your ass over here."

Person came over, still subdued. We all were. He said nothing when Bryan snatched the sunglasses off his face. When Bryan put them on Fick's face, that was when Person cheered up.

"Now _that_ is looking good, LT. You've got a career in Vegas with that look. Lilley, where's that goddamn camera of yours? We gotta get this in for posterity --"

Person stopped abruptly. He cocked his head.

"What is it, Ray," said Hasser, without turning to look at him, but then we all heard it, still faint on the horizon to the south and west of us. The warm, rhythmic beat of a helicopter, like a huge iron heart.

Fick, still woozy, mumbled a foreign word and tried to turn toward the sound. He was bound to the travois (we used his own body armor to velcro him on), and couldn't twist his body, so in the end he lay there helpless with the sound all around him as we gawked at the sky. I asked him, much later, what it was he'd said (I wrote it down phonetically) and he stared at me blankly for a moment: he didn't remember having said it. But he recognized the phrase: _Chairete, nikoumen_. Hail! We are victorious. In Plutarch, it's what the marathoner shouts in Athens just before he falls down dead.

Two helicopters, a pair of Black Hawks, that made lazy circles on the horizon and then beelined north toward our position. Wynn's head shot up as if someone had goosed him, and then he spoke for the first time in two days into his radio.

"Dustoff Six, fuck yes this is Hitman Two." The Army should not have known our codes and signs, but they did. Wynn listened to the instructions in his ear, a big, horsey grin on his face, and then repeated aloud for the rest of us to hear: "Marathon Two sends his regards."

" _Fuck_ yeah!" Now that we weren't in the dark, potentially surrounded by hostiles, we whooped and shouted it as loud as we could. If any Marine on earth had ever got some, Brad Colbert had got some. It was the perfect antidote to the humiliation of being rescued by the Army.

At the camp where he'd been dropped off, Colbert received Gatorade and a space blanket, exactly as if he'd run an official marathon. His body temperature fell fast, though, so at about 10:00 the medic on site decided to transport him to the nearest field hospital, and make him lie down. Anyway, the field hospital was where the rescue helos were headed, and that was where we saw him next, without pants, wrapped in an electrical warming blanket he'd just unplugged, hobbling through his cramps to see us land. (They cut off his pants because his thighs were bleeding: all that chafing against the fabric as he ran.) He looked absurd. Bravo Two whistled and shouted his name as they sighted him, though nobody could hear it over the noise of the rotors.

He was sorely surprised to find Fick on a stretcher instead of upright and commanding his men. He'd left before anyone knew that it would go so bad so quickly. The stretcher passed him on its way into the field hospital and he dropped one edge of the warming blanket and reached out. Fick saw him and raised his good hand in greeting, and they unintentionally high-fived in the doorway of an Army hospital tent.

*

That was the last Bravo Two saw of their Lieutenant in Iraq. He and six of his men were on a plane to a base hospital in Spain before any of them even slept that night. They sent Fick onward to a microsurgical team at Bethesda a day later. He's had two surgeries since then, both with general anaesthesia, to shape the stump of the back half of his hand, in anticipation of a custom glove prosthetic. His surgeons are pleased. Doc Bryan got all of the necrotic tissue in one try.

Nobody asked for Nate Fick's dead fingers, which anyway were rotten and couldn't be reattached. Bryan sent them to mortuary detail, with a note asking if they knew what to do with discarded limbs. He never found out what happened to them after that.

When word came down to First Recon that Bravo Two had been found, Lt. Col. Ferrando got down on his knees in front of his staff and thanked God, although he was not otherwise a religious man. Lovell rejoined the batallion about four hours later, having run 80 klicks and hitched a ride with three other Marine units before he could catch up with his own. The Batallion Surgeon seconded Lovell to his own staff, ostensibly to ensure that he didn't drop dead of exhaustion, but he ended up working directly for Ferrando for the rest of that deployment instead of being returned to Bravo Company. 

None of them were returned to Bravo Company. The ones able-bodied enough not to be evacuated out of country cooled their heels in Kuwait till they were sent back to California, three days before the rest of the batallion. Anyway, it's been the unofficial policy of all the armed forces since at least 1945 that you don't take your famous figures and put them in harm's way a second time. They usually aren't lucky twice.

Because of the time difference, most Americans think of the Lost Platoon as having gotten lost during the evening news (when ABC News scooped the other networks), and found in time to be featured on the morning shows. General Mattis gave a fantastic soundbite about his "terrific, dedicated boys," and then climbed into his helicopter and took off, sending the reporters' paper notes flying. There weren't any cameras allowed at the Army field hospital except for mine, and I had other things on my mind just then.

And that was all. No heads rolled at batallion, although a few junior officers were quietly encouraged to seek transfer later on; it was the General who'd commanded them to leave men behind, and not the batallion's decision. No heads rolled at Control, or among the bomber pilots, or the Army scouts that called in the erroneous target report in the first place. It was all a mistake, just a series of big, bad stupid mistakes that sometimes happen in war, and end up with a promising young Lieutenant screaming at dawn. Stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld likes to say.

He can say that. He didn't have to hold the guy down.

Because he was in America and because he was an Ivy Leaguer turned Marine, Nate Fick became the focus of all the news reports, his family hounded for soundbites, his college friends paid for exclusives. He himself kept firm, and refused all interviews, even Oprah. ("Even _Oprah_?" Person cried out, when he heard. There's playing hard to get, and then there is saying no to Oprah.) Eventually some other news broke, and Baghdad fell, and he got to recover in private.

Gunnery Sgt. Mike Wynn held a barbecue at his house outside San Diego in late May. I was surprised to get an invitation, but I got on a plane and headed to California. I hadn't seen any of them since I'd been pawned off on an Army press officer and sent back to the States on April 2. I knew Trombley was going to be medicaled out of the Marines by fall, thanks to his shattered pelvis, and I also knew he was the only one. Everyone else recovered well enough to go back to active duty.

The modest street where I parked my rental was already half-full of cars when I arrived. Mike Wynn lived with his family in a modest ranch on that modest street, and he did not seem to mind hosting two dozen or so exuberant young men in his yard, plus a handful of spouses and children. Country music played on a boombox, except when rap loyalists got their hands on the CD player.

I hadn't been expecting Lieutenant Fick to be there. He sat in the center of a big couch under the awning in Wynn's back yard, and the party revolved around him. When I arrived, Steve Lovell was on one knee in front of him, as if proposing marriage. Tony Espera steered me away to the beer cooler as they talked, Fick's expression serious, and after a few minutes Lovell stood up and wiped his eyes. Others took his place, surrounding Nate, never letting him alone all afternoon long. Rudy Reyes sat knee-to-knee with him, just drinking quietly and radiating pleasure. Hasser brought him a fresh beer; Pappy Patrick made sure he got his fair share of guacamole; Manimal, of all people, asked him whether he wanted carrot sticks. I was no different, honestly: I fetched him napkins and retrieved his empties. He let us all do it with a weird little smile on his face. Doc Bryan arrived after I did, and walked right over to him with his east-coast microbrew sixpack still under his arm. It sweated between his feet as he sat down on Nate's left side, picked up his hand, and looked over its still-healing surgical scars carefully in the bright California sunlight. Nate said something to him, kind. He pressed the back of Nate's hand to his forehead for a long, shuddering moment, and we all pretended not to have seen that part.

I heard engine noise from the front of the house, obnoxious and loud. Ray Person crowed with glee at the sound, so obviously he at least knew who it was. And then Brad Colbert came around the house to the back, his motorcycle helmet under his arm, and rolled his eyes at all the people shouting his name. 

He looked good. Heavier than he'd been during the invasion, tan but not burnt, relaxed. Anything would have looked better than the shaky, stunned, scarecrow figure I'd last seen in an Army hospital, but he looked like he'd arrived alone on his own terms, instead of alone because he'd had to leave his people behind. He hadn't been expecting Fick either.

"Sir," he blurted, and approached with uncertainty and fascination. "Welcome back."

"Same to you," said Fick, and stood up to close the distance. Even at a backyard barbecue, they both observed the formalities of officer and enlisted man. Fick grinned at him rather than clap him on the back. "We were just discussing all the one-handed fictional characters I'll be compared to for the rest of my career."

This, of course, was invitation to the peanut gallery that surrounded them.

"Doctor No."

"Freddy Krueger!"

"Naw, man, that dude from the Evil Dead movies with the chainsaw on his stump."

"Captain Hook," called someone from the back.

"No sir," said Colbert, a little dazed, but smiling now. "Everyone knows you're Luke Skywalker."

Everyone did, clearly. They cheered at the choice, at Colbert, at Fick, at each other and themselves. The rap music came back on, thumping at top volume.

"Fuck, man," said Person, behind me. " Did you hear? He turned down fucking _Oprah_!" I turned around, and he beamed at me from behind his Elvis sunglasses.

*

_On June 1, as this article went to press, Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick was promoted to Captain. He intends to stay on in the Marines, in a combat role._


End file.
